Essay About God-Kings And Cave Paintings

Civilized Man Vs Early Man
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Bibliography
Benton, Jenetta Rebold and Robert DiYammi. 1998 Arts and Culture, An Introduction To
The Humanitites. New Jersey. Pretence Hall
Best, Nicholas. 1984 Quest For The Past. USA: Readers Digest Association
Boardman, John. The Cambridge Ancient History. 1982. New York. Cambridge
University Press
Briggs, Asa. 1992 Everyday Life Through The Ages. Berkely Square, London Readers
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Diamond, Jared. 1992 The Third Chimpanzee. New York. Harper
Collins
Edwards, Mike. “Indus Civilization” National Geographic Vol 197, No 6, June 2000,
page 126
Fromkin, David. 1998 The Way Of The World. New York Alfred A. Knoph
Kramer, Samuel. 1971 Cradle Of Civilization. Morristown, New Jersey. Time Life Books
Mills, Dorothy. 1951 The Book Of The Ancient World. New York. G.P. Putnams Sons
Civilization And Early Cultures, An Analogy
Early civilizations are credited with introducing government, art, and religion, among
other things to the modern world. Does the credit actually belong to the people who created these
early civilizations or to those that came before? The final product may be considered greater and
certainly more polished than the product created by early man. All things found in an ancient
civilization were actually brought to them by the collective memories of the people that came
before.
Little is known about human life during the Paleolithic Period, 35,000 to 10,000 BC. Cave
paintings and a few clay statuettes are the sum total of what has survived the years for modern
archeologists to study. (Arts and Culture, An Introduction to the Humanities, p. 14,15 ) Anything
made of wood or bone has long since turned to dust. ( Everyday Life Through The Ages, p 13 )
Burial sites that have been discovered recently allow us to peek into the remote past. These
discoveries support the idea of an awareness of and homage paid to the spirits and natural forces
that shaped the world that these prehistoric people lived in. Several remote tribes have been
discovered this century . Prior to their discovery, these remote tribes, some numbering in the
many thousands, believed that they were the only people on the earth. ( The Third Chimpanzee, p
223 ) We can relate the life styles of these remote people, who have lived many thousands of
years cut off from the rest of civilization, to our ancestors who lived in prehistoric times.
Humans all over the world, since the beginning of recorded times have followed along
the same path. That is the path of creativity, worship, and organization. Many of the things we
attribute to early civilizations had its beginnings in our common prehistoric past. Ancient
civilizations and early man are alike in many ways, some of them being, religion, government and
organization.
God-kings, that is kings who took on the mantle of a God, ruled early civilizations. They
were worshipped by the masses, and acted as intermediary between the forces that controlled
nature and the human subjects that lived on earth. Early man also had an intermediary to act as
go-between on behalf of the people. He or she was a shaman, or priest. This person was
someone who was counted on to advise the chief of the tribe or community on matters relating to
the “Gods.” ( The Third Chimpanzee, p 287 )
Every force of nature was a mystery to early man, as it was to those that lived in the first,
early civilizations, and therefore a belief developed that those forces needed to be controlled.
These questions that have troubled mankind from its earliest days: Who are we? Where are we?
How did we get here? They have all been answered through the ages in one way or another. (
The Book Of The Ancient World, p 8 )
Cave paintings in Lascaux, France that date to 17,000 BC, have been found that show
graphic presentations of animals. Spearheads have been driven into some of these animal
representations. These rites by early man were held to either bring success to the hunt, or to
thank the Gods for their success at a recent hunt. We see that animal worship made its way into
early civilizations also.